Shady crowdfunded border wall now has to keep a gate open all day

The GoFundMe portion of Trump’s border wall has hit its latest snag: It will require a gate that must stay open, making it rather ineffective as a barrier.

It turns out that We Build the Wall, the organization behind the private wall effort, built some of its barrier on federal land, and in the process managed to block access to both a public monument, known as Monument One, and waterways in the process, Buzzfeed learned.

Had We Build the Wall followed proper procedure, they would have contacted the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) in advance of building the wall. That way, they would have known that a portion of their wall would block U.S. officials from getting to both a levee and a dam. But, as Lori Kuczmanski, a spokesperson for the IBWC put it: “They think they can build now and ask questions later, and that’s not how it works.”

To solve this, IBWC, according to a local NBC affiliate, “removed the organization’s locks and replaced them with their own” in order to prop open a gate in the wall — a gate that is on 33 feet of federal property, not the private property We Build the Wall was supposed to be limited to.

Unsurprisingly, the head of We Build the Wall, Brian Kolfage, did not take this well. He went on Twitter to yell about how the IBWC was an international organization that has the Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security “by the balls!”

Had Kolfage bothered to look, he’d have learned that Jayne Harkins, the commissioner of the United States Section of the IBWC is a Trump appointee, so it is highly unlikely she is the wild-eyed open borders enthusiast as seems to presume she is.

Kolfage also seems to have forgotten that just a few weeks ago, he liked the IBWC. He told the town of Sunland Park, where he built his wall, that the Commission was on his side and that the Trump administration had ordered IBWC to support the construction of the wall.

Kolfage wasn’t content to rage at the IBWC by himself. He also got his rabid supporters to call the Commission to accuse them of keeping the gate open to let immigrants into the country.

This is hardly the first time Kolfage and his half-baked wall plans have run into trouble. For a time, it looked Kolfage, with his previous history of shady fundraising, had simply ripped people off. Then, it became clear construction was proceeding, but he hadn’t managed to get the proper permits.

Kolfage managed to build a vanishingly small portion of the wall needed to secure the 1,933-mile border between the United States and Mexico. But his own incompetence means that wall has a gate that stands wide open.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.